Anatolian traveler

In 1775, the snows had barely melted when Catherine summoned Natasha to the Winter Palace. The Empress sat beneath a portrait of Peter the Great, her face unreadable.

“The Sultan grows bold,” she said, voice low as a knife sliding from its sheath. “He arms the Crimean Khanate. He courts Vienna. He thinks Russia bleeds from Pugachev’s wound. I want him to **** on his own ambition.”

She pushed a sealed letter across the malachite table. Black wax, black widow seal.

“Constantinople. You will go as Princess Natalia Romanova of Georgia—exiled, beautiful, furious at Moscow for seizing your father’s lands. You will be welcomed. You will be watched. And you will find the Sultan’s new war plans before they leave the harem walls.”

Natasha bowed. “When do I sail?”

“Tonight. The frigate *Severnaya Zvezda* waits at Kronstadt. You will speak only Turkish and French from this moment. Your old name dies here.”

Three weeks later, the golden horns of the Seraglio glittered across the Bosphorus like a promise and a threat.

Natasha stepped off the caique onto the private quay of the Georgian embassy, veil fluttering in the salt wind. The ambassador, old Prince Orbeliani, kissed her rings with trembling lips. He had been told she was the daughter of his dead cousin. He believed it. Everyone would.

They gave her apartments overlooking the sea. By day she rode through the bazaars in emerald velvet, scattering gold coins to the poor, letting poets compare her hair to henna and her eyes to the Green Prophet’s paradise. By night she slipped through the city barefoot, black silk against her skin, learning the maze of alleys that led to the Topkapı harem.

She entered the harem not as a **** but as a gift.

The Valide Sultan herself—Nakşidil, the Georgian rose who had clawed her way to power—received her in the golden kiosk. Natasha knelt, offered a necklace of Siberian emeralds, and spoke in the pure mountain Turkish of Kakheti. The Valide’s eyes narrowed with homesick delight.

“You will teach my girls to dance as they dance in Tbilisi,” she commanded.

Natasha smiled. “As my lady wishes.”

She taught them, yes. But she also listened.

The harem whispered everything. Which pasha bedded the Sultan’s favorite. Which eunuch sold secrets for opium. Where the imperial war chest was hidden. And most precious—where the Sultan met his war council in the deepest pavilion, behind doors guarded by deaf-mutes who could still see.

She found the plans on the night of the full moon, during the festival of Şeker Bayrami.